Demystifying the Delay in Qatar’s COVID Vaccination Program

In recent months, conversations about Qatar’s vaccination program have expanded on local media and social media platforms. 

“The ministry is still asleep. Other countries have completed more than a million vaccinations in one month,” said a Twitter user replying to a post made by Hamad Lahdan al-Muhannadi who was criticizing Qatar’s low vaccination number to his 220,000 followers. 

This sort of criticism primarily labels the government at fault and fails to look at the wider context to the issue. For this case, the Gulf is using a variety of different vaccines, and is facing a global delay in the transportation of western vaccines. 

Currently, Qatar is facing its second resurgence in COVID cases, and nearly a week ago, four people aged over 60 died due to COVID-19 complications, according to a statement given by the Ministry of Public Health. This had led to even more backlash against Qatar’s current vaccination and the need to understand this delay grows even more important. 

The first point to consider is that the Gulf has various countries using a combination of different vaccines to supplement their programs. Qatar is using vaccines from Pfizer and Moderna, whereas UAE is using the same two vaccines, but with the addition of Chinese and Russian vaccines. 

This is one reason as to how the UAE has managed to vaccinate over 5.7 million people, compared to Qatar’s 130,000 people, even while having four times the population of Qatar. 

However, the Chinese and Russian vaccines have had no peer-reviewed scientific study published which backs up their efficacy rates and their possible side-effects. Their approvals have only come from trial runs with varying results. 

An article by Bloomberg found the Chinese CoronaVac vaccine to have an efficacy rate of 64 percent in an Indonesian trial run and around 50.4% in the Brazilian trial run. 

This is primarily because of these inconsistencies that Qatar is only relying on Pfizer and Moderna vaccines. 

“We cannot really build a vaccination program that is not based on facts,” said Dr. Laith Jamal Abu Raddad, a Professor at Weill Cornell Medical College in Qatar who has extensively researched epidemiology and ecology of infectious diseases, and their associated vaccines. 

(Comparison between the vaccination program between Qatar and the UAE.) 

Abu Raddad said that the vaccination program in Qatar was designed with in-depth scientific analysis and rigorous public health research. Qatar’s choice of vaccines was Pfizer and Moderna from the very start. In fact, Qatar was one of the first few countries to sign contracts with these vaccine manufacturers, Abu Raddad added. 

This decision to only use Pfizer and Moderna vaccines already limit Qatar’s vaccination program. On top of that, an unexpected problem further added to this delay. 

“The vaccine manufacturers have stopped following the scheduled deliveries of vaccines which were originally set in the contracts because they are now prioritizing western countries,” Abu Raddad added. 

“Because of this, we are not yet at the stage where we intended to be.” 

This prioritization has led to a global delay in the transportation of western vaccines to the Gulf on time, which explains why countries such as the UAE started signing deals with Chinese and Russian manufactures. 

Just recently, the Biden administration ramped up the total number of weekly vaccines given to each state in the U.S. by 57%, according to a briefing by the White House press secretary Jen Psaki as reported on U.S. News & World Report. This has led companies such as Moderna, which was heavily developed through U.S. taxpayer money, to further prioritize supplying the U.S. over other countries. 

Factors such as these have further added to the ongoing delay in the vaccination program of Qatar. For instance, Moderna’s first batch of vaccines was supposed to arrive in Qatar along with the Pfizer vaccine in late December. However, a limited supply just arrived in Qatar around mid-February, according to an article by medicalxpress.

“There is a huge competition for available doses,” Abu Raddad said. 

“There is some vaccine nationalism going on,” he added. 

Even with such delays, Qatar is still moving along its intended vaccination program. 

“We have already reached a saturation for the older population [in getting the COVID vaccine], and we are now opening our program to more and more age groups,” Abu Raddad. 

A recent vaccine from Johnson & Johnson is currently under the approval process by the WHO. It not only requires a single dose for immunity but has also shown to be 85% effective against COVID-19, as found by an article by Science News.

Abu Raddad said this vaccine might be a possible candidate in fulfilling this shortage in Qatar and globally.